The other night, as I was coming off my first weekend at the Rhinoceros Theater Festival—a six-week fringe performance extravaganza, produced annually for the last 25 years by Curious Theatre Branch—a friend asked me, “What does ‘fringe’ mean?” Good question. I flailed around for a while, trying to pull a response out of the seven shows I’d just seen, but eventually realized that I was giving examples rather than an answer. So I shut up—smilingly, though, as if to say, “And there you have it.”

And that’s where community comes in. Back in 1994 I wrote a Reader cover story about Curious founders Beau O’Reilly and Jenny Magnus, and what we called their “family of affinity”: a group of people with whom Magnus and O’Reilly shared living and artistic arrangements—which is to say, their lives. Incredibly, the two of them still stand at the center of a fringe scene that’s maintained its stability even as new members have moved in and old ones moved on. They’ve done a prodigious amount to protect and foster perversity in Chicago, for which we should all be thanking them.

Among the other shows I saw during Rhinofest’s first days: Realize Theater Group’s agit-prop effort America, Inc swings way too wide, trying to hit everything that’s wrong with the country and coming off looking paranoid instead. It’d be much better cut down from 60 minutes to five and performed at a demonstration. Jamie Black misses his own point in It’s My Penis and I’ll Cry If I Want To, introducing the subject of his sex change only to veer away from it with sentimental scenes in which natural-born men cope with manhood at different stages of their lives. And as for 4Tell’s Somewhere Under the Table, well, it’s perverse in its idiosyncratic use of touchy-feely personal histories, and it’s communal in its constant assertion of the good feeling among the four performers. But, wow, is it ever terrible. This bit of neo-hippie, wise-women foolishness should’ve been kept among family and friends.

Rhinoceros Theater Festival

Through 2/23: Thu-Mon, various times Prop Thtr 3502 N. Elston 773-492-1287rhinofest.com $12 in advance online, $15 or pay what you can at the door.